The first programming language I ever got serious about learning was Python. My first intro with the language was a class called ‘Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving’. I mainly took the class because it filled a general education requirement, and it had ‘Problem Solving’ in the title which I thought was pretty cool. Out of all the problems I’ve used Python to solve, my most favorite was using Python to web scrape. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hadn’t thought much about web scraping before, however as I walked into class for the analytics program I was taking, the days itinerary included web scraping with Python and Beautiful Soup<\/a>. It didn’t take very long for me to fall in love with the idea of automating traversing websites and pulling information from them. Right after class, I went home and began fiddling around with Beautiful Soup to solve a problem I was facing at the time. I wanted to get a list of N3 level Japanese vocabulary to study. One way I looked up vocab was by visiting Jisho<\/a>, an online Japanese dictionary. I took the basic learnings from my class and end up writing a script to loop through Jisho pages, printing out vocabulary to a document which I could then use to study vocab. While the use case isn’t anything too fancy, or complicated, this was one of the first times I underwent my own Python project, and really enjoyed it! <\/p>\n\n\n\n Since my first project with scraping Japanese vocabulary, I then moved on to scrape news websites. I was helping my friend out with a project and he had a list of websites that he wanted to grab articles from. With the Beautiful Soup library I gathered some basic data for him to play around with. All the experience I had in my own side projects and helping my friend out greatly helped me with creating web \/ file scrapers for my job. Instead of manually going through files to check values, I was able to write a script to go through files on the network paths and insert records into a database. The prototype that I was able to whip up in Python has since turned into a part of our application since the data I gathered proved that we should be capturing values in our database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If there’s any takeaway from this its to play around with as many libraries as you can in a language, because you never know which one will just feel right and inspire you to create your own mini project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first programming language I ever got serious about learning was Python. My first intro with the language was a class called ‘Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving’. I mainly took the class because it filled a general education requirement, and it had ‘Problem Solving’ in the title which I thought was pretty cool. Out… Continue reading Favorite Type of Soup<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12051"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scotty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}